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> So people will still produce artwork.

There's zero doubt that people will still create art. Almost no one will be paid to do it though (relative to our current situation where there are already far more unpaid artists than paid ones). We'll lose an immeasurable amount of amazing new art that "would have been" as a result, and in its place we'll get increasingly bland/derivative AI generated content.

Much of the art humans will create entirely for free in whatever spare time they can manage after their regular "for pay" work will be training data for future AI, but it will be extremely hard for humans to find as it will be drowned out by the endless stream of AI generated art that will also be the bulk of what AI finds and learns from.



AI will just be another tool that artists will use.

However the issue is that it will be much harder to make a career in the digital world from an artistic gift and personal style: one's style will not be unique for long as AI will quickly copy it and so make the original much less valuable.


AI will certainly be a tool that artists use, but non-artists will use it too so very few will ever have the need to pay an artist for their work. The only work artists are likely to get will be cleaning up AI output, and I doubt they'll find that to be very fulfilling or that it pays them well enough to make a living.

When it's harder to make a career in the digital world (where most of the art is), it's more likely that many artists will never get the opportunity to fully develop their artistic gifts and personal style at all.

If artists are lucky then maybe in a few generations with fewer new creative works being created, AI almost entirely training on AI generated art will mean that the output will only get more generic and simplistic over time. Perhaps some people will eventually pay humans again for art that's better quality and different.


The prevalence of these lines of thought make me wonder if we'd see a similar backlash against Star-Trek style food-replicators. "Free food machines are being be used by greedy corporations to put artisanal chefs out of business. We must outlaw the free food machines."


>one's style will not be unique for long as AI will quickly copy it and so make the original much less valuable

Note that the fashion industry doesn't have copyrights, and runway fashions get copied very quickly. Fashion designers still exist in such a world.


There are alternative systems. One would be artists making a living through other ways such as live performances, meet and greet, book signings, etc.)

We could also do patronage. Thats how musicians used to be funded. Even today we have grants from public/private institutions.

We could also drift back into "owning the physical media" We see this somewhat with the resurgence of records.

NFTs would have been another way, but at least initially, it failed to become generally accepted into the popular conscious.


I'll gladly put money on music that a human has poured blood, sweat, tears and emotion into. Streaming has already killed profits from album sales so live gigs is where the money is at and I don't see how AI could replace that.




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